Hit the perfect email frequency

Does sending more emails really make more money? I quite often hear the following statement from keen email marketers: “I want to try and achieve more revenue from the email list and I’m going to try increasing the number of times I email people to achieve this, but I’m worried it might cause complaints or worse.”

Dangers of emailing too much
They are right to be concerned, if you email the wrong people too frequently, you could end up causing them to unsubscribe, complain or, even worse, block you completely (you won’t necessarily know this has happened). But you can sometimes increase short-term revenue from a list by increasing frequency, so the idea is certainly worth taking a serious look at.

The objective of the exercise should be to increase the overall revenue potential of the list, rather than focus on a short-term gain only. This is because the incorrect frequency could cause people who would have otherwise been persuaded to buy from you in the future, to stop opening your emails.

So we need to find those people who want to hear from you more and email them more, and find the ones who want to be emailed less, and email them less! Easy really!

How to identify the people who want to hear from you more
This sort of segmentation used to be achieved through preference centres, where the recipient would choose in advance what sort of emails they would get and how often. This relied on the recipient happily keeping the preference centre up to date, which doesn’t necessarily happen. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a place for the well designed preference centre, not only as a tool to get extra data from the customer, but as a good engagement device, that shows the customer you are interested in them.

The most easily managed segmentation to use when choosing to up the frequency of mailing is what I call engagement segmentation.

Engagement segmentation
Engagement segmentation is based on the recency of reaction from an email, it could be either an open or a click, or a website visit attributed to an email. I have found that the first thing a recipient does once they are fed up of your emails (temporarily) is to stop opening or clicking. If you continue to email them, not only does the ISP start to identify your emails as low priority (they will get sent to the bottom of the pile), but the recipient will also get used to ignoring them.

So as a first suggestion, consider the segment of your list most likely to appreciate more emails from you. These are going to be those who have recently opened and clicked your previous emails. If they are currently engaging with you, they are still interested in what you have got to say to them.

It’s not just about frequency; you also need to focus on the content. As the emails will be being going out more often, your content will need to remain fresh, as the recipients will soon get bored of the same content being sent to them and consequently stop opening the emails.

Know when to back off with your emails
That brings us to stage two. Once they start ignoring you, throttle back the emails. This doesn’t need to be at the first email they don’t open, but if you have been sending several emails a week to someone who hasn’t opened them in a month, you need to get the message and back off!

As you might have guessed, different people will have different times when they want to be the most engaged with you and that generally links to when they are most likely to buy something from you as well. This means that using engagement segmentation not only helps you focus most efforts on the listening recipients, you are talking to your imminent buyers too!

A final word on engagement segmentation
This type of strategy takes planning and resource, but if you want to make the most of your list, this is the way to go. I have seen many brands that have adopted this type of segmentation, increase their overall mailing volumes and as they are focused on the most engaged people, significantly increase sales and ROI.

Tim Roe, director of data and deliverability, RedEye

You can find more articles like this from the Email Marketing Council via .